Inspector Rostnikov Books in Order

Before a dissident can stand trial and make one last public statement, he is murdered in his Moscow flat. Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov takes the case knowing every answer may lead straight toward the KGB.

The Moscow Film Festival should be a showcase for the Soviet state, until a string of poisonings shatters the party. Rostnikov must work fast while the Kremlin tries to hide the killings and a terrorist keeps targeting foreigners.

Rostnikov thinks he may finally win exit visas for himself and his Jewish wife, until power shifts in Moscow ruin the deal. Then a strange murder and a rash of attacks on police push him back into the center of danger.

Punished for caring more about justice than politics, Rostnikov is shoved into Siberia and handed a politically awkward murder. Someone important wants the case to disappear, and possibly the inspector with it.

Demoted after crossing the KGB, Rostnikov is wasting away in minor crimes until a circus acrobat's death lands in his path. Another suspicious fall under the big top hints at murder and dangerous secrets.

While Sarah recovers from brain surgery, a huge terrified patient bursts into her hospital room babbling about the devil and a factory. Rostnikov is pulled into bomb plots, teenage violence, and a mystery he cannot ignore.

Rostnikov is supposed to be resting in Yalta while his wife recovers, but a former colleague dies under suspicious circumstances. Soon his holiday turns into an investigation touching a dangerous military conspiracy.

A village priest traveling to Moscow to expose powerful traitors is murdered with an ax. Rostnikov and Emil Karpo dig into church secrets and political rot that survived the fall of the old regime.

While Moscow panics over a serial killer, Rostnikov is sent to Havana to quietly handle a murder case involving a Russian politician. The assignment is supposed to be diplomatic, but nothing about it stays simple for long.

Post-Soviet Russia is up for grabs, and Rostnikov's squad is buried under chaos. A kidnapping, a pack of brutal street children, and vanished Czarist treasures all point to a society changing faster than the police can manage.

Rostnikov faces a hate-fueled wave of attacks against Moscow's Jews while a violent rapist stalks the city. At the same time, an old mystery involving a murdered baroness and a lost golden wolf keeps tugging at him.

A savage dogfighting ring and a rising drug war put Moscow on edge. While his investigators go undercover, Rostnikov tries to stop the violence before the city tips into open bloodshed.

A former Mir cosmonaut vanishes, and then members of his old crew start dying. Rostnikov has to work through secrets, bureaucracy, and the wreckage of the Russian space program to learn what happened in orbit and on Earth.

Rostnikov boards the Trans-Siberian to trace money tied to a missing Czarist document that may still matter a century later. Back in Moscow, his colleagues juggle a kidnapping and another bloody thread of violence.

Rostnikov is sent from Moscow to a Siberian diamond mine to investigate a murder in brutal, isolated country. What looks like one grim case opens into smuggling, corruption, and a conspiracy with international stakes.

Rostnikov and his team hunt a serial killer believed to have claimed dozens of victims. Their work also pulls them into a prostitution investigation and a chain of murders that reaches far too high for comfort.